Wednesday, 31 October 2012

I’ve decided to move to Antarctica. Yep, it’s true. I know
it’s cold and there will only be penguins and scientists to talk to but I’m
going. Dave Connell from the Australian
Antarctic Division – which is based in Tasmania - has convinced me that
Antarctica is Nirvana for data management. At his fascinating talk at the eResearch Australasia conference
in Sydney he said that the Antarctic treaty demands ‘free and open access to
observations and results’. This means that they have more than just carrots to
get research data plans and collections from scientists, they also have a
mandate - with teeth. And even better, NASA runs the metadata tools used by the
Australian Antarctic Division. In the near future they will be minting Digital
Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their data collections and they are involved with
the Thomson Reuters Citation Index.So
I’m going. Penguins (and scientists) are cool. Literally.

One particular project I’m going
to keep tabs on since finding out about it at the eResearch conference is the ODIN Project. While you may know Odin as the legendary ruler of Asgard, the ODIN project is something else entirely. The ORCID
and DataCite Interoperability Network
(ODIN) is a two-year project
that will ‘build on the ORCID and
DataCite initiatives to uniquely identify scientists and data sets and connect
this information across multiple services and infrastructures for scholarly
communication’. CERN, the British Library, ORCID, DataCite, Dryad, arXiv and
the Australian National Data Service are all ODIN partners. The project is
funded by the European Union. What’s exciting about this project is that it
links the leading international project for unique and persistent
identification of researchers (the ORCID
project) with the force leading an international culture of research data
citation using DOIs (DataCite). This has
huge potential to increase the ‘carrots’ for sharing data, such as citations
because ‘it
will address some of the critical open questions in the area: Referencing a data object; Tracking of
use and re-use; Links between a data object, subsets, articles, rights
statements and every person involved in its life-cycle’.

At the panel discussion on
the ‘Australian eResearch Forum’ Professor Tom Cochrane suggested a university
might ask itself some questions to determine where it is up to in the eResearch
space:

·Is eResearch referenced in university
plans?

·Is there a Director of eReseach?

·Is there an eResearch support unit?

·Are research management, postgrad
training, technology and the library involved?

·Are
regional, national and transnational collaboration identified and underway?

He
suggested that Australia has invested heavily in eResearch and much has been
achieved – national capability and national coherence in particular. But there’s
not such a big tick for national sustainability and that’s something we need to
work on.

As
the conference wrapped up yesterday I reflected that in some areas we seem to
have come quite a long way in a short space of time. But in other areas, we
seem to be progressing very slowly indeed. I hope that next year’s conference in
Brisbane will show improved progress, new ideas, new innovation and new ways of
collaboration. Of course, I’ll have to travel all the way from Antarctica for
that.

Monday, 29 October 2012

It was busy and exciting day yesterday at eResearch Australasia in Sydney.
Under the theme of ‘emPower eResearch’ the conference brings together eResearch
practitioners, researchers, business providers and educators to discuss the
latest and greatest in information and communication technological innovation to
enhance research management and analysis. Racing from session to session in a
very tightly packed programme, I did manage some time catching up with new and familiar
faces and hanging out in the breaks at the Griffith booth which has a fabulous
red couch and free chocolates!

Reflecting on yesterday, I noticed a maturing of the
discussion since I first attended this conference 3 years ago. For those of us
who have carried out projects funded by the Australian National Data Service
(ANDS) – and there are 250 such projects at Australian research institutions –
it’s now four years on since ANDS first began. While it’s easy to be critical,
to my mind a great deal has also been achieved during that time. At Griffith we’ve
had some true successes, such as the building of Griffith Research Hub which
started with funding from ANDS and then grew with internal funding sources. We’re
now at the point where we can build on our successes to make improvements on
existing infrastructure, build new services and aim to significantly increase
use of research infrastructure to support our hard working researchers. As past
guinea pigs, we can share our experiences with those closer to the start of
their eResearch journey which could help speed them on their way. It struck me
yesterday that we’re really never going to be finished our eResearch journey
because, as Dr Clifford said in his keynote speech on the Earth Cube: ‘we are trying to stay
on top of the galloping pony of technology’.

A particular theme that ran throughout the entire day
yesterday in every session I attended was the importance of community. Dr Clifford talked about the way in which the
National Science Foundation (NSF) has facilitated synergy within and across
communities in the geosciences that had never existed before. He said that one
of their end goals was to assist in reducing the amount of time researchers in
the geosciences spend gathering data and increase the amount of time they spend
analysing it. Other talks I attended focussed on engaging with
discipline-specific research communities to build innovative technologies that
assist researchers to manage, access and analyse their data such as neonatal specialists,
crystallographers, and hydrologists. Within this, there have been some terrific
tools built to assist researchers, in particular those involving visualisation
tools and animation. Finally, at the session on sustainable software
development, I participated in a focus group on building communities. The point
was to ensure that software produced during the course of a project does not
end when project funds run out. Instead, continual development is sustained by
an active and caring community of users. This approach is critical given the
project-based nature of eResearch funding and the conclusion of ANDS in the
middle of next year.

About Me

Natasha Simons is a Research Data Management Specialist with the Australian National Data Service, an organisation set up by the Australian Government to enhance the value of data for researchers, research institutions, and the nation. Located at Griffith University in Brisbane, Natasha serves on the Council of Australian University Librarians Research Advisory Committee and is an ORCID Ambassador. She is an author and reviewer of papers related to library and information management and co-authored a 2013 book on digital repositories. Natasha was the Senior Project Manager for the Griffith Research Hub, which won awards from Stanford University and VALA. She is an advocate for open data and open repositories. Natasha is @n_simons on Twitter.